Adeline by Norah Vincent Read Free Book Online

rebutting punch, bent around the better man’s fist.
    Even Lytton would not say it quite this way—there is too much fondness between them—but he implies as much, and Leonard puts it to himself in the harshest terms in his own voice. Useless, it says, pathetic, one more sedentary snob lip-serving the cause of the common man for the sake of his own self-image.
    He glares at the mess on his desk, the papers, the paper clips, the pens, the books, the ashtrays, the pipes, the pale blue stationery, all the twee accoutrements of his class and lifestyle, and observes caustically: This whole ridiculous midden is all just more rubbish to the rubbish collector in the street, and rightly so. Too bloody rightly so.
    Ah, well, he sighs, stretching his arms above his head and lightening slightly. It doesn’t matter. So what if none of these mock-heroic struggles on paper will make the slightest difference? Who cares if none of this will be taken seriously by anyone other than my debate society friends, or remembered by anyone at all? I could play table tennis all my days, I suppose, he thinks, and achieve the same result. Lytton would approve.
    He winces a little at the defeatism in this, but then smiles again, remembering, after all, how Lytton did once phrase it.
    “You’re stuck with it, I’m sorry to say, Woolf, as trying as it can be—and, heavens, don’t I know it—but it’s simply how you think.”
    Lytton had paused here wryly, in his typical style, the great bush of his facial hair almost but not quite hiding the smirk that he could never deny himself.
    “This is the boring through-line of your mind, alas,” he’d said drolly, rubbing his hands along his thighs. “Which is, by the way, boring in both senses—dull and skewering.”
    This last bit was yet another set piece of Lytton’s delivery, the kind of parenthetical aside he always threw in, a grace note to the main dig, because it delighted them both. Leonard had giggled, as usual, at Lytton’s flirtatious way, though he had done so, also as usual, with misgivings, because he had known that this was not an attitude or a sound he could reproduce under any other circumstances. Not even with Virginia.
    It was theirs alone, his and Lytton’s, one of many small but precious vulnerabilities they shared. He’d let these tender intimacies stand, because they had done so for such a long time, and because he needed to maintain in adult life the kind of closeness with another man that he had so enjoyed in his youth. But he did so now less easily than he once had, and against his wiser judgment. Every unguarded portion of himself leaves him more open to the ravages of loss.
    His feelings, he thinks, looking down again at his handiwork, are not like all these tables and charts and arguments, subject to his need for control. He can feel himself nearly choking on this reminder of love, as he hears Lytton’s jolly, lilting voice summing up “the fierce and lugubrious mind of the Woolf.”
    “Sorry, old man,” he’d said, at last setting aside his
Julius Caesar
with a sly grin. “But there’s just no stopping it. It’s like some heinous carnival spit, your brain, turning over and over the same charred carrion. Poor fellow. I do sympathize, but there it is.”
    It has always been a good joke, and a needed one, but it does not change the fact.
    Overriding it all, he hears his father chiding with his clarifying mind, as he so often did over supper with his wife and brood of nine sitting awed. It is his father’s blood ethic that boils in Leonard’s veins, forcing him back always to the same ideal, even while he sees through it.
    To concede failure, and so relatively early in life, that is a sin against suffering, surely? This is what he has always said in his own defense, and all teasing aside, it is a view Lytton, Keynes, Forster, Bell and all the others share. It is what defines them as a group, their belief, and their insistence, held over from the Apostles, but